Edgar Degas

Executed on cream wove paper. The sheet is reinforced with tape along upper edge on verso and the tape strip is t-hinged to a mat in two places. The sheet is somewhat dirty and time darkened overall and there are scattered losses to the perimeter, especially at bottom edge and lower right corner, which are outside of the image area. There are a few studio stains and minor foxing as well as the Atelier Degas stamp on the verso. The image itself shows no damages and the colors are well preserved. Aside from some minor surface dirt this work is in good condition.
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Degas arrived in Italy in 1856 where he would remain for three years, travelling from Naples to Rome, Rome to Florence. He had already copied many of the great Italian masters displayed at the Louvre in Paris. During his Italian journeys, the wealth of material for the young artist to learn from and copy was enormous. Unlike many other artists who copied a composition in its entirety, Degas tended to focus more on particular figures within larger compositions. Ian Dunlop writes about this interest: “If his copies are seen as a whole, it becomes apparent that Degas’s main interest lay in Italian painting between 1450 and 1550…. His eye was apt to be caught by movement of a figure or group away from the centre of the composition. He developed a taste for the eloquent fragment, the unobserved detail, a taste which became a characteristic of his mature style” (Ian Dunlop, Degas, New York, 1979, p. 19).

Jeune homme, vu de profil exemplifies Degas’s fascination with figures on the edges of compositions. Copied from Pintoricchio’s fresco Burial of San Bernardino in the Chapel of San Bernardino in Santa Maria in Aracoeli, Rome, Degas focuses on a smaller male figure that appears in profile to the viewer’s right of San Bernardino’s coffin (see fig. 1) Pinturicchio’s composition contains dozens of figures set in an idealized city space which evokes that of Perugino’s Cosenga delle Chiavi, located in the Sistine Chapel. Pinturicchio had worked with Perugino in the Sistine Chapel and it was shortly after his work there that he had received his own commission for the Chapel of San Bernardino, which can be seen as the first major independent commission of his career in Rome.

The present work relates to no. 87e in the Atelier Degas Catalogue, 4th Vente. See Philippe Brame & Theodore Reff, Degas et son oeuvre, supplement, New York & London, 1984, nos. 4-6, illustrated pp. 4 & 6.